A Wife For The Pretender

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30793, 3 July 1965, Page 4

A Wife For The Pretender

A Wife For the Pretender. By Peggy Miller. Allen and Unwin. 159 pp. Bibliography and Index.

One of the less noticeable highlights of English history is the fate of the later Stuarts, whose dream of reoccupying the Throne took 50 years to fade out. This short but authoritative book tells the story of the exiled son of James II and Mary of Modena, in his search for wife. The Old Pretender, as he is now called, living in Bologna as a pensioner of the Pope, employed Charles Wogan, an Irish soldier of fortune to visit the Courts of Europe and discreetly report back to him in his Italian refuge on any European princess who might make him a suitable wife. Wogan’s choice fell on the youngest daughter of the exiled Prince and Princess Sobieski of Poland, and negotiations were begun between the two parties, as a result of which the strangest iove-story in history came into being. The little Princess, Maria Clementina Sobieski who was at this time sixteen, fell in love with her suitor, as it were by correspondence, and he with her, and the letters they exchanged make touching reading. The romance, however was not to run a smooth course. Charles VI of Austria, head of the Holy Roman Empire, prompted by George I, King of England, refused to allow the Princess to travel through his realm, on her way to Italy, white her father began to waver in his approval of the match.

However, he eventually relented, and the young Princess and her mother set forth on the long journey southwards, hoping to evade the Austrian Emperor’s vigilance. Alas, they lingered too long at Augsberg and on entering Austria were promptly captured and interned in the Castle of Selestat. The rescue, with her mother’s connivance, of the Princess by a party of James’s adherents, and subsequent journey over the Brenner Pass into Italy forms the

main subject of the book, and is as exciting as a historical novel.

The cavalcade, which was carefully disguised as a family group of no great importance, travelled in the depth of winter over rough mountain roads in one of the lumbering coaches of the time, knowing that recapture would mean a most unpleasant death for the escort, and an ignominious return to her parents of the prospective bride. But luck was on their side, though relays of horses were difficult to come by, and they eventually reached Italy, freedom and a happy union for James and his bride, who, being the Pope’s beloved god-daughter, was warmly welcomed by the populace. She became the mother of the charming but trouble-making “Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

The complexities of European travel in an age when all transport was by horse or foot, where inns were filthy as well as being few and far

between, and roads so bad that coaches were constantly being overturned, has to be studied to be believed. Despite these obstacles important letters and dispatches were carried back and forth by undaunted couriers from one part of the continent to the other with regularity, and the hazards involved disregarded in the interests of power politics.

Both bride and bridegroom in this strange romance emerge from their correspondence as loveable and courageous characters, while the six men and one woman who braved death on their perilous mission of rescue also earn warm tributes more than two centuries later from those who have followed their story. The author has gathered much material from Wogan’s own memoirs, but has also had recourse to a wide bibliography besides, and the book has some interesting illustrations of eighteenth century Europe.